News, Analysis and Perspective for Solution Providers and Technology Integrators

ID Agent Releases New Marketing Tools To Empower MSPs

‘A big push this year is really focusing our educational presentation,’ says Matt Solomon, ID Agent’s vice president of business development. ‘We’re telling partners when we present to them, ‘Take what we’re saying and repeat it -- use it for your lunch and learns.’ And we’re also providing them with the marketing materials to do that.’

ID Agent this week unveiled a new guide that walks managed service providers through planning and hosting “lunch and learn” events to generate sales leads and executing follow-up plans.

The “Goal Assist Playbook” features checklists to accomplish starting six weeks prior to an event through tracking returns on investment once it’s over. It includes a worksheet to define the event’s purpose, target audience and presentation basics, and samples for an online landing page, email invitations and follow-up, and social media posts.

The guide is like a soup-to-nuts playbook on how to run a lunch and learn down to the detail of hiring a catering staff, said Matt Solomon, vice president of business development for the Bowie, Md.-based provider of dark web monitoring and identity theft protection solutions.

“A big push this year is really focusing our educational presentation,” Solomon told CRN at The Channel Company’s XChange 2019 event in Las Vegas this week. “We’re telling partners when we present to them, ‘Take what we’re saying and repeat it -- use it for your lunch and learns.’ And we’re also providing them with the marketing materials to do that.”

Among the white-labeled marketing materials created inhouse are PowerPoint presentations, infographics, videos and all kinds of sample emails.

“Our goal is just to make our product and other products that they’re selling as easy as possible to sell to their end user,” Solomon said.

ID Agent has garnered 1,300 partners in 16 countries in its 22 months of being in the channel after switching from its original direct selling model in 2017. It wants to have 3,000 partners by year’s end.

“It’s been gangbusters,” Solomon said, noting the company attended 45 MSP events last year and is on pace for 80 to 90 this year. “We continue to get the word out about our product. Events are really the best way to get in front of MSPs, and it’s also a massive opportunity to educate MSPs on how to sell security.”

The company on Tuesday announced the release of BullPhish ID, new phishing simulator and security awareness training that MSPs can provide for their customers’ employees. The platform, which is included in ID Agent’s current pricing model, uses real-world social engineering attacks with video-based training.

“The phishing and training really hits home with the end users when they’re actually failing phishing tests,” Solomon said. “It empowers an MSP to go back to their customer to implement other security services, because they can say, ‘This percentage of your employee base failed a phishing test. We need to implement a security training program and security policies.’”

ID Agent also has a sample “decline of service” email, which MSPs are increasingly sending to their customers.

“It essentially says to the customer, ‘Hey, we’ve talked about this new product offering, we’ve told you the risks, and because of this, we’re making it mandatory now, because there’s a liability assumption. And if you don’t want to sign up for it, you have to sign this decline of service,’” Solomon said. “We’ve had unbelievable success with our partners using that.”

ID Agent had one MSP that went from monitoring 10 domains to 200 domains as a result, adding upward of $150,000 in revenue, according to Solomon.

Customers often expect MSPs to be providing certain services but don’t want to pay for them, he said. By signing the decline of service email, they’re acknowledging they’ve been made aware of their system compromises but don’t want to pay for monitoring services.

“So if a breach ever occurs, you have that document to back you up,” Solomon said.

ID Agent’s most successful channel partners are the ones most engaged with the company, according to Solomon, and they have a designated employee who’s responsible for their vendor relationship.

“In a lot of cases, we’re working with owners,” he said. “They could have 10 vendors that they’re working with, and so they can’t do a deep-dive into our marketing materials. If you take a marketing person and give them ownership over the ID Agent partnership, they’re going to be logging in once a week to see the different marketing materials that we’re providing, and they’re more likely to take advantage of that stuff.”

Otherwise, he said, MSPs are “not utilizing what’s fully available to them to make more money.”